Jack Cloudie

your peril.’

Jack sighed. The whole plan seemed reckless to him. Hoping to pick up the trail of the Iron Partridge and its companion airship from the Imperial Aerial Squadron transporting the Kingdom crew as prisoners towards the testing facilities at Mutantarjinn. Assaulting both airships with the guardsmen’s legion of flying biologicks, attempting to capture the two ’stats intact enough to continue their journey and infiltrate the enemy stronghold under the guise of being a prize vessel. The commodore’s secret police contact seemed sure enough of the guardsmen’s ability to pull the mission off. They would utilize the four Jackelians’ knowledge of the best way to board the Iron Partridge and fight off the prize crew, hopefully with the assistance of the skeleton crew of prisoners of war being kept on board to assist with the foreign systems. But even if the ruse worked, sneaking into the Cassarabian den of sorcerers was one thing; getting out alive was quite another, let alone getting out with evidence of how the Imperial Aerial Squadron was manufacturing its airship gas. Did Jack owe the Kingdom this? Impressment into the navy was bad enough, but mounting one of these hideous hybrids on a suicide mission — he hadn’t exchanged his court sentence for that.

But there was Captain Jericho, who had gambled on pulling his poorhouse friend’s son off the gallows and into the service. What did Jack owe Jericho, hopefully still alive on a prison hulk heading for Mutantarjinn? What did he owe Coss Shaftcrank, who had risked his life to save Jack from the trumped-up charges of mutiny? Or the commodore, who seemed determined to drag Jack along in his trail, trying to keep them both alive despite the hard hand that lady fortune had dealt their party of intelligencers?

The young guardsman appeared to mistake Jack’s pensive face simply for reticence to mount the drak. ‘You have nothing to fear, Jack Keats. This bull drak may not be the steed that I was destined to ride, but by the hundred smiling faces of god, he will know the finest flyer in the guards is in the saddle when he feels my stirrups on his flanks.’

‘I was thinking more about the act of boarding and taking two airships in flight before they can be scuttled,’ said Jack. ‘It’ll be flash work up there.’

‘My strategy is sound,’ said Omar. ‘The Imperial Aerial Squadron are cowardly curs who need the protection of canvas and cabin just to brave the reach of the heavens. They won’t know how to operate your strange metal airship and will have their hands full with the prisoners they have made of your people. We shall swoop down on them with our claws reached out, like a flight of eagles taking a pair of fat pigeons.’

‘I thought the strategy came from your commander of many faces?’ said Jack.

‘Master Uddin values my advice,’ said Omar. ‘He asks it many times, recognizing the wisdom that I hold within me. Besides, the duty for all loyal guardsmen can be found in our oath to the ruler of rulers — this impostor Caliph Eternal must be toppled and the rightful light of lights returned to his throne to rule.’

Jack nodded. The oath a man makes. And what of the promises Jack had made to his brothers in the poorhouse, to come back for them with enough money to free them from that dirty, squalid place for good? To be together again as a family? I can only keep them if I live through today.

There had been a touch of iron in the young guardsman’s voice when he mentioned his oath. The kind of iron the leaders of the street gangs used back home when discussing which properties and marks to target for a robbery.

‘But there’s more than your oath at stake here,’ said Jack.

‘You are correct in that,’ said Omar. ‘The dogs who plotted this treason, the grand vizier and his minions and his precious Sect of Razat — they burnt my home and destroyed my inheritance and killed everyone I knew, everyone I loved. They have left me with nothing except my life among the guardsmen. Tell me, Jackelian, what would you do to such people as did that to you?’

What would he do?

‘Whatever I had to,’ said Jack.

‘And you will live to see it, Jack Keats,’ said Omar. ‘You will live to see the day I plunge my steel into their leaders. This I swear on the blood of my father.’

A pair of guardsmen emerged from the side of a tent holding long curled horns and blew a bugle-like summons, a haunting, echoing call. Everywhere around the camp, the draks’ riders appeared, guardsmen running towards the reins of their chosen mounts. Jack followed Omar to his creature, the sinuous neck rearing eagerly against the reins of the stable hands holding them, the young guardsman mounting the double saddle just behind the base of the neck first, extending a hand down to Jack to mount up behind him.

The stable hand reached up to pat the saddlebags beneath their feet. ‘All the grenades we can spare,’ he said, and tapping long dangling weaves of rope, added, ‘as well as propeller snarls for their engines.’

Omar raised his hand casually, as if to say, all this he already knew and did not need to be reminded of it.

‘Do you have the day’s smoke colours?’ asked the stable hand.

‘Yes,’ said Omar. ‘But I only need two of them. Red smoke for “dive and attack”, and green smoke for “release boarders”.’

‘May the Caliph Eternal’s blessings light your way. Tails up!’

A beating noise sounded, low at first, then louder and louder, like wet sheets being shaken out to dry, and Jack realized it was the talon wing of draks taking to the air. They were starting from the other end of the piece of land wedged between the hills, like a ripple of scaled flesh erupting down the valley. T-shaped silhouettes broke for the sky, pushing higher and higher as they curled around each other and filled the firmament with their din — the noise of their beating wings swelling as if a thousand angry spears were shaking in warriors’ mailed fists. On the rear of the saddle, Jack felt himself rock as their drak started to bound forward, its wings angling back as it built up speed, the ground shaking out dust with the weight of its charge. Omar was shouting something down to it, cracking his reins, but Jack was too terrified to make sense of the foreign-sounding cry, his knuckles white on the pommel of the double saddle. The ground below had almost disappeared in the mist of dust being driven up off the hard valley floor. The drak’s long neck was tilted down like the straight edge of a lance, and they were running through the kicked-up, wing-beaten powder of the draks who had taken off seconds earlier, now lost in the haze.

Jack willed himself not to bite his tongue. How did these monstrous creatures sense each other well enough not to pile into each other within such a damn soup? Omar shouted something back to him, and Jack was just hearing it as ‘Hold on!’, when the drak threw itself up and, still charging, fanned its wings out as though they were sails.

The first beat was followed by a second and a third as the drak angled up over the dust, the heads of its fellow flyers arrowing out behind them. To Jack, they resembled serpentine sea beasts emerging from the ocean on monstrously powerful wings. After four minutes, their drak gained its cruising altitude. Not so high that they would have needed the dangling breather masks Jack had seen being packed into the drak’s saddle bags, and well within the operating height of a pair of airships crossing clear skies over what they no doubt regarded as friendly territory. Now all of the guardsmen were in the air, the draks had formed into a double ‘V’ arrangement. Omar and Jack’s drak was towards the centre of the inner V’s left-hand wing. Such a formation, flying high, would resemble a flock of migrating birds to observers on the ground, with no way to scale the aerial legion against the cloudless, cerulean sky.

Omar pointed to the riders to their right with one of the big leather riding gloves he used to guide the reins. ‘There is your friend, the big one with a eunuch’s tonsure.’

Jack nodded. Henry Tempest. If the details of the pre-flight briefing he had attended still held true, all four Jackelians should be riding somewhere on the inner ‘V’. It was Jack and the commodore’s job to peel off and take back the Iron Partridge — the easier mission, with her guns theoretically silenced by the absence of her gunners and a foreign prize crew trying to keep control of the handful of RAN sailors they would have manning the airship’s stations. The captain of marines and Westwick were taking the harder task of assaulting the well-manned prison ship.

Jack’s mind went into a fugue as they flew for hours and hours, hypnotized by the cold winds and the beating sun above. The monotonously regular ground passing below like a backdrop painting from a stage set.

Eventually a faint spume of white smoke went up from the head of the formation — enemy sighted. The flight of draks began to wheel and climb and Jack was finding it harder to breathe. Each intake of air into his lungs felt as if two strong hands were pushing down onto his chest, restricting his muscles from working. Jack leant forward to tap Omar on the shoulder, indicating the saddlebags, and croaking: